by Belva Plain
“There's something you're not telling me.”
“I forgot you're a lawyer! You'll dig till you find out something, won't you? But I guarantee that you won't like it when you do. Poor Lillian, she's in for a hard night, I see.”
There was the faintest twinkle in Bettina's eyes. They're not real friends, he thought. They never were. A woman as beautiful as Lillian rarely has real friends.
“You want to tell me,” he said, “but you're waiting for me to beg you. Never mind. Lillian will tell me.”
“Maybe she won't give you the whole story. It's a rather unusual one. You see, there was another woman studying in our group here, a very rich one from Texas, and Lillian stole her passport. Then there were other things, a little medical problem—”
Donald interrupted her. “That man is driving away, so please get Lillian now. Here's the money for the lunch.”
A rat, he thought, despising the disloyalty and the pleasure that this so-called friend was taking in what she no doubt now saw as a mounting, very interesting drama. And he got up to wait on the outer step for Lillian.
“Donald, where are you going? We haven't had lunch yet.”
“We're not having it here. We need to do some talking before we think about eating.”
“Oh, I'm sure she told you, but I'll repeat it. He's a man I knew for a while. He's rather nasty, and I didn't want to see him again. That's the whole story.”
“No, not the whole. What about the passport you stole?”
“Stole? She said that about me? Why, damn her, she knows I didn't steal it. I haven't stooped to thievery, for God's sake. I borrowed it for one afternoon to show somebody—oh, all right, to show it to that man. It was fun. A game. A trick, pretending I was somebody else.”
“But you were afraid of him just now. You were terrified.”
“He has an awful temper, and I didn't want a scene here.”
“And the little medical problem?”
“She said that?”
“She did. What was it?”
“Oh, Donald, do I have to rake up every rotten memory in my life? I notice you don't rake up yours.”
“I've told you everything about myself. Everything, so help me.”
“Either you're not telling the truth, or you have no rotten memories, which I find hard to believe.”
“No, I would have told you if there had been any. I've had some sadness, but nothing rotten. Nothing I'm ashamed to talk about.”
“Lucky you.”
“There's too much secrecy between us. Come to think of it, there always has been. I'm going to persist until you tell me about the medical problem. I have a right to know.”
When she began to run, he caught her. “Be careful on those steps. Take my arm before you fall. In your condition—”
She turned then to face him. “All right. You won't be satisfied until you hear. I had an abortion. So?” And she waited.
They were following the river. Ahead of them a woman pushed a baby carriage, a pair of lovers paused to embrace, and tourists aimed their cameras. Timeless river, he thought again.
“Why?” he asked.
“It's a long story, and I'm terribly tired. I want to go back to the room and sit down.”
In silence they walked and went up to the room. Then she spoke.
“I met this man. We were in a group. He was Italian, very handsome, and he liked me. Somebody said he came from a distinguished family. And then there was a girl from Texas who was studying here, a rich girl with a well-known family name. Oil, I think it was. So I thought it would be fun to pretend I too was distinguished. And I showed him her passport. I took her name, Jean. She didn't mind. She was going back to Texas that week to be married.”
The room was still. On the floor there was a carpet printed in squares with a circle of flowers inside each square. When Donald looked down, he saw that his feet were neatly placed at the center of a square. When he looked up, he saw that Lillian, turned away from him, was staring out into the yellow afternoon. Then he looked back down at his feet.
“The man, this man, was impressed. We made love and were very happy. He took me to see his family, to meet his parents. They lived in a house, a small palace, that they'd owned for five generations. He gave me jewelry, heavy gold, beautiful pieces, the watch I always wear. He drove a Lamborghini.”
“What about him? Him? Do you think I give a damn what he drove, what he owned?”
“There's nothing else. Somebody told him the truth about me—I don't know who did—and he was furious. So violently furious that I thought he was going to kill me. So I flew home, went to work for Howard Buzley. And that's the story.”
Now they faced each other. There she sat waiting for him to say something while she smoothed her hands. He had always disliked the gesture, but now it roused an unreasonable anger that he fought to control.
“The whole story, except for the small matter of pregnancy and the abortion?”
“I had no money. At least not enough. What was I to do? Answer me that.”
“I don't know. . . . You had no right in the first place. . . .”
“It was a joke. The whole thing was a harmless joke.”
“Harmless? You fool with people, you lie. . . . Don't you believe in anything?”
“Oh yes, I believe in beauty, and freedom, and pleasure. It's a short, short life.”
“You lie,” he repeated. “You conceal. God only knows what more I shall learn about you tomorrow, or next week, or next year. God knows.”
“Perhaps there shouldn't be any next year.”
“Talk sense, will you? And please stop caressing your hands. I hate it.”
“I can't help doing it. I'm nervous when I'm with you.”
“Nervous with me? What have I ever done to you but love you?”
“You've been very, very good to me, Donald. That's what makes it so sad, don't you see? Because we started to go downhill after the first few months. We couldn't help it.”
Downhill? he thought. Our summer days on the boat in Central Park? in Venice last week?
But you're forgetting, Donald, because you want to forget. What of the night you were too despondent even to go home? And that awful party? You will never really know whether she was on her way to bed with that man. Very likely she was. And she has not let you touch her since we left home on this trip. Why, Donald? She is full of secrets. She has been from the start.
Lillian continued, “The zest has gone out of it for us. Oh, don't look like that! I'm not impugning your manhood. Some passionate loves last longer than others, that's all, and ours hasn't.”
“You have someone else,” he said.
“I could have very easily, but it happens that I do not. Oh, it's you, it's us! I wasn't going to say all this while we were here, I dreaded having to say it, but then things happened today and maybe it's all to the good that we're out in the open.”
“You told me once that it's easy to get along with anybody as long as he's truthful, so I'm asking you to tell me truthfully what's wrong with me.”
“There's nothing wrong with you, Donald. You're kind, you're honest, and you have a brilliant mind. But life is heavy for you, dead serious, while I want—”
He interrupted. “You're telling me that I never laugh?”
“Oh, you do but—well, it's just that you and I laugh at different things. I say again, we're too different from each other. The atmosphere, the friends, the people we like to be with—all opposite. You're disgusted with what you think was a cheap affair, with my trick, with the abortion, with the whole business.”
“I certainly won't deny that.”
“And anyway, you don't really like me, Donald. You only like to make love to me, which is not the same thing.”
“I don't believe what I'm hearing. You might as well be speaking Eskimo, or Bulgarian, to me.”
Yet always, he thought then, there are two sides. No, there are three—his, hers, and the truth. She thought him straitlaced, and he was. He thought
her loose, and she was. So perhaps after all the storm, the fever, the truth was somewhere in the middle place where they could not meet?
He looked again at the swelling beneath her belt. There was another life to be considered here besides theirs. Order, peace, and common sense were slipping away. The future was slipping out of his hands, and he must retrieve it if only for the sake of that other life.
“Come on,” he said. “The afternoon's half over and we haven't gone to the museum.”
Lillian shook her head. “It's too late today. It's almost time to meet for Giorgio's dinner. He's invited a lot of our old friends, people I want to see again.”
“You should be thinking about what we're going to do about ourselves. We have a lot to straighten out before that baby arrives and we have to take care of it. Let's have a good dinner by ourselves at the best place in Florence. You choose it.”
“But I want to see my old friends. This has been a bad day, Donald, and I need a pickup.”
“I don't think you do. I think you and I need to be together.”
“We can be together at the party and talk later. Come on, you're invited.”
“I assume I would be, since I'm your husband,” Donald said, stiff with anger.
“Donald, I want to go.” She stood up and put on her jacket. “Will you come?”
He had gone as far as he would. “Do as you please,” he said. “So be it.”
When the door closed behind her, it left an echo in the room. Whatever way all this should end, he would remember the sound of that closing door. Where would he be, remembering?
Now he, too, had to get out of this room. After consulting the city map, he found his way to the Uffizi Gallery, and there spent a weary hour standing before the masterpieces that in his present state of mind were merely a blur of colors. Afterward he walked slowly back to the hotel and ordered dinner, not because he was hungry, but because it was routine to eat at the end of the day. Back again in the room, he idled over a stack of magazines, and at midnight, went to bed, where he lay staring into the dark.
At some point he must have fallen into a doze, for suddenly he was startled to feel that the other half of the bed was vacant. It was after six by the clock. He got up and went to look out the window, where a hard rain was falling under a pale gray dawn.
Where was she? Fear like an arrow shot through his chest. He thought of calling the police, but had no idea what to tell them or even how to describe Lillian. The city was full of tourists and he had not noticed what she was wearing. He did not even know that man Giorgio's last name. The best he could do would be to wait another hour or two, then go down to the desk and ask for help. Back and forth he walked, watching at the window for full daylight, and then put on his clothes to be ready for it. Because there was nothing else to do, he lay down again on the bed; sleep came, and although he felt its coming, he was too exhausted to fight it.
When he awoke, he looked at the clock and was horrified to find that he had slept until half-past eight. He leapt up and ran to the outer room of the suite on his way to the elevator and the front desk. And there she lay, crumpled in disarray upon the ornate sofa, her jacket, soaking wet, tossed on the floor, along with the delicate shoes they had bought in Rome. Beside them on the floor was her handbag with a pile of paper money, coins, and cosmetics.
Donald stood, simply stood, as if unable to move, and stared at the mess, at the open mouth and sodden hair.
Then he must have made a sound because she wriggled up to a sitting position and smiled. Once in a while before now he had seen that smile. It was ugly; it was a flat row of white teeth with no welcome in her eyes or anywhere but on the flat lips; for an instant they opened, and then as quickly closed. It was in fact a mechanical movement, no smile at all.
“Well, I guess I'm in for it,” she said.
“Where were you?”
“You know. At a party. You could have come, but it's just as well you didn't, you wouldn't have liked it.”
“But you liked it.”
“Very much.”
“You stayed all night at Bettina's or Giorgio's?”
“Oh no, there were too many of us. We split up.”
Steady, Donald said to himself. Cautious and steady.
“Who was he, Lillian, the man you slept with?”
“What's the difference? If I should ever see him again, I probably wouldn't recognize him.”
“My lady wife. Why don't you stick a knife in me?”
“It was a party, Donald! People do these things. People have fun. Husbands do these things, but you're not that kind of husband. That's what this is all about, what I've been trying to tell you. Listen to me. Let's end this without anger, do things in a civilized way, as you always say. I don't want any money from you, honestly I don't, not a penny. I'll have an abortion and—”
“You!” he cried trembling. “There are no words for you except filthy ones.” And grasping her by the shoulders, he shook her. “Over my dead body will you dare touch that child. It belongs to me, too. Remember that.”
“Be reasonable. You can't very well stop me, Donald.”
“Can't I? An abortion now wouldn't even be legal! I'll have you followed every time you go out the door. I'll threaten any doctor who does it against my wishes, I'll threaten him with a lawsuit. The minute you walk into a doctor's office, you'll be followed, and no doctor will want to touch you.”
“Do you really care that much? Yes, I suppose you do. It's your family, your parents, isn't it? You want to continue the line. Yes,” she said rather gently, “I remember, you want a son.”
Her hand was dangling over the arm of the sofa. On her finger there glittered the ring that he had bought on that radiant day in London. Which the illusion, which the reality?
“I'm sorry. I wish it was different, Donald. You must know that I never meant to hurt you.”
He knew that. There was no meanness in Lillian.
“It's better now than next year or the year after that. It's bound to happen sometime. You do see that, don't you, Donald?”
He walked across the room to the window and looked out at the rain. Minutes passed, during which he was well aware that she was still sitting there watching his back, and that her eyes were filled with tears. He was aware that his thoughts were only mad, blind fragments rushing about in his head. She wanted to end it! A few short weeks into their second year, and she wanted to end it.
When, when is the instant when a flash of certainty, a harsh, cruel light, pierces through your darkness and brings you to a halt? You may be walking across a room, or watching the rain in your despair, when it stabs you.
So it came, that instant in which he accepted the end. As Lillian said, it was bound to come. Better sooner than later.
“I'm going for a walk,” he said, turning about to face her.
“In the rain?”
“It doesn't matter.”
He had a plastic raincoat, but no hat. That didn't matter, either. Squalls of cold rain billowed the coat when he went outside, and beat his bare head as he walked along the river to the old bridge. In his ears, from every direction, there rang a clamor of church bells, the sounds of a European Sunday, of tradition, of habit and ordinary lives.
But now he knew better. Of course he had always known that people and things are so often not what they seem; a child knows that. Still, he had never had to apply that knowledge to himself. And he thought again, as he had once before when first there had been a serious difference between his wife and himself, of the book that you open and find within it what you had never expected to find.
There were so many questions he wanted to ask! Filled as he was with a conflict of anger and grief, he found room for pity. Lillian had so much to offer, so much intellect, charm, oh so much charm; why then, and from where, had come that other streak? What had made her so? He did not know. He only knew that he wanted and needed to fly home.
They went downstairs into the lobby and ordered a taxi to the airpor
t. Lillian, in dark blue travel clothes with a glimpse of pearls at her neck and her fine matched luggage at her feet, was the elegant young woman whom Donald had seen on that first April day so long ago. Men glanced at her as they passed. Men glanced at her in the airport.
He had only been able, at the last minute, to get two separate seats, one in first class, which he gave to Lillian, and the other in tourist. They were separate now, as they had never expected to be. And alone, in silence, each bore his burden of regret, while the engines roared to the west, and home.
Chapter 6
May I ask you something? What did you see that you really didn't like when I brought her here?”
It was the second time that Donald had asked this question during the last quarter of an hour. It had been an especially painful quarter of an hour, not because it was painful to talk to Augustus Pratt, who of all people would give wise support—indeed, Donald had been home for two weeks now, and had found it too difficult to tell even the closest of his contemporaries what was happening—but because whenever he looked beyond Pratt's face, his eyes met that old photograph of the united family, the wife, the children, and the cozy dog sitting on a sofa.
“Why? Did I say anything to make you think I—”
“It was what you didn't say.”
Pratt made a small gesture with his hands, palms turned up. “I don't know, I can't give you an intelligent reason, it was just something. It was just an impression. I'm awfully sorry, Donald. You don't deserve it.”
“Does anyone, ever?”
“Oh, you know better than that. Of course some do. Tell me, are there going to be any problems with the divorce?”
“I'm told not. It can be done in no time at all, since there's no argument about anything, certainly not about money. She's the strangest person. I don't understand why she accepts my verbal promise to take care of her and the baby. She has no lawyer and doesn't want one.”
“Strange, indeed. Nevertheless, I would insist on doing this the usual way. You'll have a lawyer, and he'll insist that she have one. You could be ruined, Donald. To you, I hardly need explain how or why. By the way, where are you living now?”
